UPCOMING EVENTS

Tailor Brands, a company that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to help companies automate elements of their marketing and branding, has announced a new AI-powered social media management tool that automatically creates, schedules, and optimizes content to share on social networks.

Launching out of beta today, Tailor Social is an expansion of an existing product the company already included as part of its core product offering.

Founded in 2014, New York-based Tailor Brands has raised north of $20 million in funding, including a $15.5 million round just a few months back. The company has been setting out to teach computers how to design logos, formulate landing pages, and even plan social media strategies. However, all these features were bundled together as part of a single package. With a standalone Tailor Social subscription, the startup is opening up the feature to everyone — whether they want an automated logo design or not.

Moreover, Tailor Brands is expanding the scope of the offering. While it already offered up social-sharing text and designs constructed by its own AI bots, it will now recommend content from across the web — such as articles, videos, and GIFs. Brands have to first tell the platform about their industry and areas of interest, and Tailor Social will do the rest, including suggesting schedules for sharing to Facebook, Twitter, and soon Instagram.

Above: Schedule: Tailor Social

Above: Timeline: Tailor Social

It’s worth noting here that while the social scheduling automation can be set up with humans giving the final approval, there is also a complete autopilot mode, which — as its name suggests — automates everything. You just sit back, and Tailor Social does it all — though that may be a step too far for some social media managers out there.

“The autopilot is fully automated — it finds content and schedules it all automatically without any manual intervention — but only if you want it to be,” Tailor Brands CEO Yali Saar told VentureBeat. “It can also work on a semi-automated basis, where it only tells you what to do … what we discovered with many SMB owners is you need to build trust before you are willing to hand over the keys to something you hold as valuable as your social media page. Seeing the system make the right choices before you let it go fully automated is very important for that process.”

In terms of pricing, there are three core plans. The basic $10/month tier includes up to two social media accounts (e.g. one Facebook and one Twitter) and comes with 50 scheduled posts, social analytics, and a “junior” designer tool. Upgrade to the $15/month professional tier and you get 500 scheduled posts, advanced analytics, and a “master” designer tool. The $50/month corporate plan allows up to 9 work colleagues access the account and manages up to 30 social media accounts, with access to 2000 scheduled posts.

There are plenty of social media scheduling tools out there, with some also leveraging AI to optimize content — Cortex being just one example. Automation is infiltrating just about every facet of the digital world, and online marketing is no different. For those who don’t want to personally engage with users on social media, Hootsuite recently launched Hootbot to automate interactions with followers and fans on social media sites.

“When you look at the social media management space, there are a lot of tools aimed at big companies and very few that cater to small players,” added Saar. “We wanted to create a tool that anyone can use — one that wouldn’t only save users scheduling time but would also help them choose the right content and optimize it just like a social media expert.”